Caramelised Garlic Loaf – The Fifth Taste

The caramelised garlic bread. A loaf that binds and divides, stimulates questionable bodily reactions, a best-seller kickass dinner party impresser, your secret weapon. Our secret weapon. It is a polarising loaf with fans, many of whom are strictly divided into two camps of ‘absolutely love it!’ to ‘yuck, get it away from me’.

Some interesting google-lations about garlic

• Garlic is part of the genus termed ‘Allium’
• Did you know that Garlic is great plant companion for Apricots, cherries, peaches, raspberries and roses? But they don’t get along as swimmingly with beans, cabbages and peas (not unlike many kids I know)
• Along with vampires – aphids and cabbage white butterflies do not like garlic. Turn it into a weapon of pest control by soaking it with hot chillies in water for 2 weeks, then strain the mixture and use as a spray. Alternatively, it sounds like it could make a nice sauce.

From the facts above, yes I did get a little carried away with the world of companion planting. But back to the loaf. It’s an interesting nut to crack, the combination of flavours in this one. We all know the sweetness comes from the caramelised garlic folded into sweet Italian ciabatta dough. Biting into the caramelised garlic loaf is akin to releasing a bite-sized flavour bomb of sweet and savoury in your mouth, and all the way up through your olfactory system.

And according to Jesse, this flavour bomb is not liked by the Europeans, not one bit.

Jesse at the Marrickville Markets (Sundays)

Jesse (for those who may be wondering) is one of our market boys, popular to many who make the weekly or monthly trip to their favourite farmer’s market. He told me that across all the markets, many older European couples (usually Northern European migrants who’ve lived in Australia but did not grow up here) don’t fancy the taste of the caramelised garlic loaf, particularly due to the mix of sweet and savoury flavours in bread.

Yes, so polarising a loaf that it has sparked many a debate between people standing in line at Jesse’s Brasserie Bread stall. ‘There truly is no in-between!’ gushed Jesse, when I asked him about general sentiment around the garlic loaf.

But why the stark divide? In Eastern cuisine, sweet and savoury breads are part and parcel of everyday life – think pork floss buns for afternoon tea, or kaya spread (a Malay coconut egg jam) on toast dipped into a half-boiled egg for breakfast. The combination of sweet and savoury in Eastern cuisine is the norm. Even that combination has a name, known as the fifth taste (in addition to sweet, salty, bitter and sour), or simply termed ‘Umami’ which translates roughly, to ‘savoury deliciousness’

Taking its name from the Japanese, Umami can be experienced by simply combining ingredients that work well together – such as meat and tomatoes, garlic and cheese. Savoury deliciousness indeed! Our resident Japanese in Customer Service, Alex explains Umami in the context of the language itself ,

“For example, when eating a good-quality fresh piece of salmon sashimi, it is umai (good). But when you eat that piece of sashimi with some soya sauce, it is umami (delicious). Umami refers to the ability, or complement of flavours to bring out the full flavour potential of a type of food.”

Back to our garlic loaf, roasting or caramelising the garlic before folding and baking it into the loaf allows the natural sugars to develop a sweet complex flavour. In other words, it brings out the many different characteristics of garlic aside from the usual way it is experienced when cooked normally.

““When you roast garlic, you turn it soft, sweet, and unassertive”

The artisan baking process
Caramelising the garlic into sweet, sweet submission, hand-moulding Italian ciabatta dough to distribute natural ingredients of flour, water, salt and yeast evenly, baking it in a stone-hearth oven -  every step of the process coaxes intriguing flavours out of hiding, creating a loaf that is umami ga deru, translating literally to ‘the essence of flavour has come out’.

I hope I haven’t gone on too much a tangent, or shredded the Japanese language to within an inch of its life. Feel free to fill in the gaps on Umami that I may have missed, or tell me: Are you one part of the group who loves sweet/savoury combinations, or are you part of the other group that prefers flavours to kept simple, separate and defined?

Find out more about Umami, the fifth taste